I know a lot of you use YouTube to upload and organize your videos online. We'd still love to see your skydiving videos here on Dropzone.com though so we've added an option to our video section that enables you to stream your YouTube videos through this site.

No need to upload your video again, simply select the "Add Video Stream" option when you're ready to Submit a Video and paste the YouTube URL (from your browser) into the appropriate field. Couldn't be easier, we'll even fetch the video for you!

You can of course still upload your videos to Dropzone.com directly from your PC hard drive. With the new streaming option you're able to link your YouTube videos to your profile here on Dropzone.com and bring it to where the skydivers are.

As with directly uploaded videos, other Dropzone.com members can comment and rate your video right here on the site. This is a great way to continue building your video library on YouTube while at the same time sharing your skydiving clips with the largest skydiving community in the world.

I don't understand what the practical application of this is. The video section here appears to simply embed youtube video objects.

What do you mean by "stream through this site"?

I'm pretty sure it means "embed youtube video objects" as in this is a good place to find or place an index of skydiving videos that are interesting to people who use this site. Youtube's indexes are filled with whuffo chaff.

Basically the practical application of this is that for many users around the world, ultra-highspeed internet is not available. But many users use youtube to upload their videos and do not want to sit through the process of uploading them again to another site which can take hours depending on the internet connection, even here in South Africa a 50mb video would take about an hour.

This allows users to instead, just copy the link of their youtube video and share it on here instead of having to upload the whole video again. And for those with internet cap restrictions, it also saves on bandwidth usage.

"Stream through this site" pretty much means what it says though. You can find an archive of skydiving videos in one place (here) sorted by precise category and then view the embedded video on dropzone.

The idea is to create less effort/resource usage for the uploader, and more content for the viewer.

In addition, YouTube uses services from Akamai to spread the distribution of videos out to a massive network of servers that are dispersed world-wide. Content is moved and cached between servers so that the consumer (you) are watching the video from the best source possible relative to where you are. There is probably much more to their formula, but thats the gist of what they do. Dropzone.com is probably hosted at a single location, so everyone goes to that one location to watch videos hosted on the site. This can cause issues for streaming quality if a lot of folks are watching, or if there is a bottleneck between you and dropzone.com. Akamai/YouTube reduces some of those risks by eliminating some amount of distance and hops.

Also, using YouTube to distribute the videos vs. hosting them locally probably reduces the overall costs for running dropzone.com as they aren't paying the bandwidth to stream all those videos. Or maybe their ISP costs are fixed, in which case its just a matter of performance.

I like this new feature, just tried it and it even got all the descriptions from youtube. I'm waiting for review and i should get and email shortly from dropzone.com. I will post it as soon as i get it so you can all tell me what you think of it.

I like this new feature, just tried it and it even got all the descriptions from youtube. I'm waiting for review and i should get and email shortly from dropzone.com. I will post it as soon as i get it so you can all tell me what you think of it.

Ok i got the video approved next day... So i'm a little late, here is the link http://www.dropzone.com/videos/Detailed/1825.html Let me know if you like it. Thank you,

I like this new feature, just tried it and it even got all the descriptions from youtube. I'm waiting for review and i should get and email shortly from dropzone.com. I will post it as soon as i get it so you can all tell me what you think of it.

Ok i got the video approved next day... So i'm a little late, here is the link http://www.dropzone.com/videos/Detailed/1825.html Let me know if you like it. Thank you,